Think The Cassette Tape Is Dead? Then Why Did Sony Just Squeeze 185TB Of Data Onto One?

Vinyl is making a comeback, but for all intents and purposes the reign of cassette tapes is long since over, right? Perhaps not, if
Sony has anything to say about it. At today's International Magnetics Conference (Intermag) in Europe, the company is presenting a method of data storage utilizing magnetic tape which is capable of holding a whopping 148GB per inch.

I have fond memories of walking to my local Wherehouse, stocking up on Maxell XLII-S blank cassette tapes (back me up 80's kids, these were vastly superior to Memorex), and settling in for a weekend of crafting the most glorious mixtapes imaginable. Sony's new breakthrough in storage capacity would mean one insanely comprehensive mixtape.

Back in 2012, a collaboration between FujiFilm and
IBM resulted in prototype cassettes which could hold 35TB of data, and at the time that was considered a monumental accomplishment. Sony's new method means you could cram 185TB onto a single cassette tape. The average Blu-Ray disc holds 50GB and a standard PC hard drive 1TB.

To accomplish this, Sony has utilized and enhanced a technology known as "sputter deposition," which involves drastically shrinking the magnetic particles on the tape.

Obviously the creators of the Walkman aren't envisioning their new storage technology being used in the consumer space, but Sony says this is way more than an experiment. Magnetic tape is still a viable option for mass data storage and backup, and Sony wants to commercialize their product and bring it to market in the near future.

Interestingly, the Tape Storage Council claimed that tape storage shipments grew 13% in 2012, and were projected to grow to 26% in 2013.

So in an age of cloud storage and plummeting hard drive costs, why would tape still be relevant? A 2012 report at NewScientist explains that traditional hard drive data centers use 200 times more energy than a tape storage array of the same size. Or how's this for a data scare? When it goes into full operation by 2025, the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope will kick out 1 million gigabytes (1 Petabyte) of data per day.

Facebook meanwhile has adopted Blu-Ray as its storage medium of choice, and is expected to launch their own storage facility by the end of this year which stores 1 Petabyte of data onto 10,000 discs. Either way, we're going to need some seriously beefy storage solutions by the year 2020, when the IDC predicts the entire "digital universe" -- all data created, replicated, and consumed -- will blow up to a staggering 40 trillion gigabytes.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this nostalgia-tinted piece by Forbes contributor Michele Catalano about the lost art of the mixtape.

Since 2005 I've been entrenched in the video game and consumer tech industries, and fascinated with the rapid evolution of the technology surrounding them. In addition to Forbes, I've contributed to gaming and technology features on PCWorld and Computer Shopper, and spent 16...